The Art of Composition part 13
There is nothing but Line
by Jared Lloyd
A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness. - Joan Miró
Line. The most basic, the most fundamental component of the elements of design. Ignore them at your peril. Embrace them, learn to see them, compose with them, obsess over them in your compositions, and the possibilities are limitless.
Sound a bit hyperbolic?
It’s not. Lines are the foundation of all compositions in visual art. They lead the eye, they denote changes, they divide the picture space, and they define the boundaries of shapes. Some lines are real. Some are perceived. And like most things in art, we can trace the importance of lines directly back to our own biology and evolution.
I have written quite a bit about the power and resolution of the human eye over the last couple years, how that it’s surpassed only by diurnal raptors in the world, how we see in colors and details that no other mammal is able to do. But with all that visual information comes the need to be able to process and make sense of it all. And we do this by both seeing and ignoring patterns.
Humans love visual patterns, and lucky for us the world is obligingly filled with them.
As I write this, I’m looking out over a vast saltmarsh. Black needle rush dominates this landscape I see from my office window, filling a mile or more of my field of vision from the lofty perch at my desk. Like most plants, needle rush creates a visual pattern filled with infinite vertical lines. Plants grow toward the sun. And the sun is overhead, of course. Therefore, the visual pattern of lines in nature tend to be vertical.
But there's something out there, roughly 50 meters away. It instantly grabs my attention. It’s different. And this visual contrast, this disruption of the pattern, is immediately noticed - something called saliency, which I will return to in a future article.
The thing that my eye naturally gravitates to is a narrow game trail that cuts a horizontal line through the marsh. White-tailed deer use it. Racoons, river otters, bobcats, clapper rails, and the rest of the menagerie of air breathing animals in this tidally flooded marshscape rely on this trail. And my eye recognizes this line across my visual field immediately because of the way in which it disrupts the pattern of the landscape. It’s different. And in the world outside of our hermetically sealed bubbles, different could be dangerous. Or, it could be food.
Those of us who make our living finding animals in the wild (we all used to make our living this way), have a saying: look for the horizontals.
Humans are unique in the world of mammals because we spend most of our time standing on two legs, like a bird. For the rest of our class of animals, however, life tends to be spent on all fours, head closer to the ground, where all the good smells are. And the result is that most other mammals tend to create a sharp and contrasting horizontal line that cuts across the vertical patterns of a landscape with their backs.
Whether I’m on the tundra in Denali National Park searching for caribou or the temperate rainforest of Great Smoky Mountains National Park looking for black bears, it’s this horizontal line that usually betrays a mammal’s location to me.
The retina of our eyes is filled with tiny light-sensitive cells we call rods and cones. These photoreceptors are themselves arranged in a grid-like pattern. It’s this pattern of rods and cones that helps us detect sharp transitions between light and dark areas that our brains then interpret as lines. Lines that could be the back of a leopard. Lines that may come together to form the shape of a lion. Lines that are trails to follow. Lines that could be a snake. Lines that could be lightning. Lines that could be a distant river during the dry season. Lines that converge together allowing our two forward facing eyes to process binocular vision into depth perception and helping us to calculate how far to hurl an atlatl at dinner. Or lines that suddenly shift and betray the presence of a predator judging our distance and palatability.
Everything about the way we see and visually experience the world around us comes down to lines and how we interpret and process that information.
"Good composition is like a suspension bridge; each line adds strength. . ." - Robert Henri
So, as visual animals, if we specifically evolved to see and interpret lines around us as a matter of survival, then how do you think these lines are impacting your WILDLIFE photography?
Lines create patterns, they create shapes, and they lead the eye. This much we have established. But they also create the difference between harmony and tension, chaos and balance. They create contrast. Lines give us the perception of detail in both fur and feathers. And all of this comes down to the way in which we have evolved to interpret lines, making meaning out of the world around us.
As I mentioned in part 12 of the Art of Composition, there is variation in what people consider to be the elements of design. This is, of course, dictated be medium. Interior design is quite different from wildlife photography, for instance. This is why we find varying accounts of what artist consider to be the foundation. But in photography, it’s generally accepted to be seven of these elements, starting with line.
Consider the other six and how they are dependent on lines. . .
Shape – created by lines joining together.
Space – formed by lines that denote the separation of shapes
Form – how shapes (lines) occupy space
Notan (value) – created by the balance of light and shadows, separated by lines
Texture – created by contrasting lines of highlights and shadows.
Color – separated from each other by perceived lines at the edge of the the colors.
Most photographers, when they think of composition they actually think of form – how shapes are arranged to occupy space. This tree goes here, that rock over there. Yet, even within this arrangement of form, lines govern the most basic concepts we know.
"Line is the most powerful tool we have in art." - Wasssily Kandinsky
Consider the rule of thirds for a moment. This so-called rule is an invisible tic-tac-toe board of intersecting vertical and horizontal lines. We then place vertically oriented shapes along vertical lines and other important shapes of interest (a fox, bear, moose, etc.) at the converging points of the horizontal and vertical lines. The point of these hypothetical lines used within the rule of thirds is to divide up the composition into three distinct areas, demarcated by the perception of intangible lines.
Think of some of the other compositional terms you may have heard of such as the horizon line. Have you heard of the middle line perhaps? What about Baroque lines? In the article on Mastering Birds in Flight in this issue of PhotoWILD, I discuss both middle lines and Baroque lines in composing vertical photos of birds on the wing. Such is the importance of understanding line in visual composition. There really is little else.
In the examples here, I am going to deviate from the conversation of wildlife photography and instead focus on some of the most famous paintings in the world. The idea behind doing this is to show the universality of line and its importance in composition. We must first begin to see the lines and how others compose with them before we can truly begin to appreciate their use and apply them to our photography.
Under the great wave off Kanagawa.
Katsushika Hokusai.
Of all the many paintings that have stood the test of time, Katsushika Hokusai’s depiction of a tsunami has captured the imagination of both eastern and western civilization for hundreds of years. The painting, which is actually a print from a woodblock carving, has become one of the classic examples of how art, movement, and feeling are all brought together in a composition thanks to the prodigious use of lines.
When we look at “the great wave,” and we attempt to separate the composition from the emotion and the color, we find ourselves looking at little more than line after line after line. The sweep of the wave, the foam of the water, Mount Fuji in the distance, the great boats cast upon the seas, everything, every element, every aspect of this painting can be distilled down to lines and the shapes they imply.
Bringing the mood and feeling of the scene back into play here, Hokusai manages to bring both balance and tension into the composition with the use of lines. The balance I speak of comes in the form of the Fibonacci Spiral that the lines of the tsunami itself follow. Meanwhile, tension is created by the moment itself, a cresting tsunami on the verge of engulfing all, that also happens to follow some the diagonal Baroque lines that are used in visual art specifically to create tension. More on both the Fibonacci Sprial and Baroque lines to come in upcoming articles.
Both real and perceived lines come together to create Under The Great Wave Off Kanagawa. While at first we may only see the magnitude of the event and appreciate the complexity and motion portrayed here, it doesn’t take much effort to see how that this entire masterpiece can be distilled down to Hokusai’s use of of strong lines in this composition.
Under the great wave off Kanagawa.
Katsushika Hokusai.
Of all the many paintings that have stood the test of time, Katsushika Hokusai’s depiction of a tsunami has captured the imagination of both eastern and western civilization for hundreds of years. The painting, which is actually a print from a woodblock carving, has become one of the classic examples of how art, movement, and feeling are all brought together in a composition thanks to the prodigious use of lines.
When we look at “the great wave,” and we attempt to separate the composition from the emotion and the color, we find ourselves looking at little more than line after line after line. The sweep of the wave, the foam of the water, Mount Fuji in the distance, the great boats cast upon the seas, everything, every element, every aspect of this painting can be distilled down to lines and the shapes they imply.
Bringing the mood and feeling of the scene back into play here, Hokusai manages to bring both balance and tension into the composition with the use of lines. The balance I speak of comes in the form of the Fibonacci Spiral that the lines of the tsunami itself follow. Meanwhile, tension is created by the moment itself, a cresting tsunami on the verge of engulfing all, that also happens to follow some the diagonal Baroque lines that are used in visual art specifically to create tension. More on both the Fibonacci Sprial and Baroque lines to come in upcoming articles.
Both real and perceived lines come together to create Under The Great Wave Off Kanagawa. While at first we may only see the magnitude of the event and appreciate the complexity and motion portrayed here, it doesn’t take much effort to see how that this entire masterpiece can be distilled down to Hokusai’s use of of strong lines in this composition.
Girl With Mandolin
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso is someone I talk about quite a bit when it comes to art for one very good reason: his philosophy on art completely changed the way in which artists thought about their craft.
Picasso had been formally trained as an artist. He could emulate the styles of the great artists who had come before him as was expected at the time. But by the time Picasso was making a hardscrabble living as an artist on the streets of Paris, photography, in some form, had existed for the better part of a century. Picasso believed that since we could now create an exact replica of reality with a photograph, artists should no longer be constrained by the old “rules” of visual art that governed our perceptions of what art should be?
As a photographer, I am fascinated by this. My chosen medium of art, and what it did for the visual art world, completely transformed other artistic mediums.
But to take this a step further, perhaps more than how much photography changed visual art, it’s how art came to fall back on the fundamental elements of design as a means of breaking free from tradition that I find most interesting.
Cubism was Picasso’s first big artistic breakthrough, and was touted has having completely reinvented painting. Girl with Mandolin is my favorite of Picasso’s cubist paintings, and is what art historians have now identified to be analytical cubism – meaning the use of purposefully flattened geometric shapes and hard lines to render the natural world in an almost abstract like fashion. Instead of attempting to emulate the three-dimensional world in a two-dimensional medium (a problem that photographers wrestle with to this day), cubism embraced the two-dimensional and sought to emphasize this. Gone are the vanishing points, the attempts at creating perspective, and all of the realism that can be obtained with a photograph.
And at the heart of it all is line.
In modern art, line becomes paramount, placed front and center, often as the artistic subject itself. Consider the work of Joan Miró, Jackson Pollock, and Wassily Kandinsky as examples of this, all attempting to grasp what it meant to be an artist in the age of photography. But it was cubism that was the revolutionary breakthrough, that moment in which artists realize digging their heels in on the elements of design allowed for infinite forms of creativity in the visual arts, freeing them from the confines of reality.
Girl With Mandolin
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso is someone I talk about quite a bit when it comes to art for one very good reason: his philosophy on art completely changed the way in which artists thought about their craft.
Picasso had been formally trained as an artist. He could emulate the styles of the great artists who had come before him as was expected at the time. But by the time Picasso was making a hardscrabble living as an artist on the streets of Paris, photography, in some form, had existed for the better part of a century. Picasso believed that since we could now create an exact replica of reality with a photograph, artists should no longer be constrained by the old “rules” of visual art that governed our perceptions of what art should be?
As a photographer, I am fascinated by this. My chosen medium of art, and what it did for the visual art world, completely transformed other artistic mediums.
But to take this a step further, perhaps more than how much photography changed visual art, it’s how art came to fall back on the fundamental elements of design as a means of breaking free from tradition that I find most interesting.
Cubism was Picasso’s first big artistic breakthrough, and was touted has having completely reinvented painting. Girl with Mandolin is my favorite of Picasso’s cubist paintings, and is what art historians have now identified to be analytical cubism – meaning the use of purposefully flattened geometric shapes and hard lines to render the natural world in an almost abstract like fashion. Instead of attempting to emulate the three-dimensional world in a two-dimensional medium (a problem that photographers wrestle with to this day), cubism embraced the two-dimensional and sought to emphasize this. Gone are the vanishing points, the attempts at creating perspective, and all of the realism that can be obtained with a photograph.
And at the heart of it all is line.
In modern art, line becomes paramount, placed front and center, often as the artistic subject itself. Consider the work of Joan Miró, Jackson Pollock, and Wassily Kandinsky as examples of this, all attempting to grasp what it meant to be an artist in the age of photography. But it was cubism that was the revolutionary breakthrough, that moment in which artists realize digging their heels in on the elements of design allowed for infinite forms of creativity in the visual arts, freeing them from the confines of reality.
The Mona Lisa
Leonardo de Vinci
Leonardo de Vinci’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the Florentine silk merchant, Francesco del Gherardini, is undoubtedly the most recognizable and famous painting ever created. Despite the fact that the Mona Lisa is used as an illustration for teaching different principles in art, however, rarely does it find its way into a discussion on lines.
But lines, once we begin looking for them, abound in this portrait. Even the most important component of this painting for many art historians, the use of sfumato, can still be distilled down the that most fundamental element of design.
When people do speak of the use of lines in the Mona Lisa, it’s usually confined to the way in which de Vinci composed Lisa along the Middle Line. If we picture two lines, one vertical and the other horizontal, dividing the composition into equal quarters, we find that the portrait is composed perfectly along these two perpendicular lines. The vertical line, the most important for portrait work, runs through Lisa’s left eye (the one on the right). Meanwhile, her shoulders are composed along the horizontal line.
This Middle Line doesn’t really exist in the painting, of course. Much like the lines in the rule of thirds, these are guidelines to help with the form factor of the composition. As is another “perceived” set of lines in the shape that Lisa takes on in this painting.
Notice that the subject is painted as a nearly symmetrical triangle. Pyramids and triangles are used in composition to create balance and harmony. So, while there is neither a hard line running vertically down the middle of the composition, nor a hard triangle boxing in the subject of the portrait, both are implied here.
What is not implied, however, is the detail of her clothing, the wrinkles in her sleeves, the meander of the river in the background, the peaks of the mountains, and all of the landscape that unfolds beyond which are unmistakably composed around distinct lines.
Be it painting or photography, the details we perceive in visual art, such as the folds in Lisa Gherardini's dress here, are nothing more than small lines of contrasting highlights and shadows. When our photographs look flat, when there seems to be no detail in a bird's feathers or a bear's fur, notice that it's the lack of those small lines, the lack of the same highlights and shadows used by de Vinci in the Mona Lisa that make it so.
But this isn’t want makes the Mona Lisa famous.
Of all the many components to the Mona Lisa that has made this painting stand out through the ages is de Vinci’s use of a technique called sfumato. An awkward word for us English speakers, sfumato means “smoked off” or “blurred” in Italian.
In stark contrast with Katsushika Hokusai’s painting above, de Vinci went through great pains to try and remove the obvious lines of Lisa Gherardini’s skin and features. Look closely and you will see that shading is used to denote edges instead of lines, giving her a softer, younger, and more realistic transition between features and details (something portrait photographs try hard to emulate today when photographing women). In other words, what makes this painting so famous is Leonardo de Vinci’s experimentation with other ways of showcasing and suggesting detail by implying lines. The lines are still there, it’s just that they are “smoked off” and “blurred” by shading.
I chose to include the Mona Lisa in this because of the sfumato and implied lines that bind together the triangular shape to her. While the lines found in the other two examples are extremely well pronounced, here they are more subtle. But make no mistake, these lines were paramount in the creation of the most famous painting in the world.
The Mona Lisa
Leonardo de Vinci
Leonardo de Vinci’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the Florentine silk merchant, Francesco del Gherardini, is undoubtedly the most recognizable and famous painting ever created. Despite the fact that the Mona Lisa is used as an illustration for teaching different principles in art, however, rarely does it find its way into a discussion on lines.
But lines, once we begin looking for them, abound in this portrait. Even the most important component of this painting for many art historians, the use of sfumato, can still be distilled down the that most fundamental element of design.
When people do speak of the use of lines in the Mona Lisa, it’s usually confined to the way in which de Vinci composed Lisa along the Middle Line. If we picture two lines, one vertical and the other horizontal, dividing the composition into equal quarters, we find that the portrait is composed perfectly along these two perpendicular lines. The vertical line, the most important for portrait work, runs through Lisa’s left eye (the one on the right). Meanwhile, her shoulders are composed along the horizontal line.
This Middle Line doesn’t really exist in the painting, of course. Much like the lines in the rule of thirds, these are guidelines to help with the form factor of the composition. As is another “perceived” set of lines in the shape that Lisa takes on in this painting.
Notice that the subject is painted as a nearly symmetrical triangle. Pyramids and triangles are used in composition to create balance and harmony. So, while there is neither a hard line running vertically down the middle of the composition, nor a hard triangle boxing in the subject of the portrait, both are implied here.
What is not implied, however, is the detail of her clothing, the wrinkles in her sleeves, the meander of the river in the background, the peaks of the mountains, and all of the landscape that unfolds beyond which are unmistakably composed around distinct lines.
Be it painting or photography, the details we perceive in visual art, such as the folds in Lisa Gherardini's dress here, are nothing more than small lines of contrasting highlights and shadows. When our photographs look flat, when there seems to be no detail in a bird's feathers or a bear's fur, notice that it's the lack of those small lines, the lack of the same highlights and shadows used by de Vinci in the Mona Lisa that make it so.
But this isn’t want makes the Mona Lisa famous.
Of all the many components to the Mona Lisa that has made this painting stand out through the ages is de Vinci’s use of a technique called sfumato. An awkward word for us English speakers, sfumato means “smoked off” or “blurred” in Italian.
In stark contrast with Katsushika Hokusai’s painting above, de Vinci went through great pains to try and remove the obvious lines of Lisa Gherardini’s skin and features. Look closely and you will see that shading is used to denote edges instead of lines, giving her a softer, younger, and more realistic transition between features and details (something portrait photographs try hard to emulate today when photographing women). In other words, what makes this painting so famous is Leonardo de Vinci’s experimentation with other ways of showcasing and suggesting detail by implying lines. The lines are still there, it’s just that they are “smoked off” and “blurred” by shading.
I chose to include the Mona Lisa in this because of the sfumato and implied lines that bind together the triangular shape to her. While the lines found in the other two examples are extremely well pronounced, here they are more subtle. But make no mistake, these lines were paramount in the creation of the most famous painting in the world.
The point of this article has been to introduce you to the importance of line in composition. How it is used and how it is also implied, by considering other artists’ work outside of wildlife art and wildlife photography. I chose to start here, with paintings, and ones that had nothing to do with animals, for one very simple reason: not only are these elements of design the foundations of all visual art, but painters get to start with a blank canvas. This blank canvas imparts unlimited freedom to arrange everything exactly as an artist wants in their compositions, whereas wildlife photographers, as we all know, do not enjoy that same freedom.
But just because we don’t have the ability to plan out a composition beforehand like a painter does, doesn’t mean that line and the other elements of design are any less important. In fact, I would argue the opposite. Because we don't have the ability to pick and choose what goes into our compositions to the same degree as someone with a blank canvas does, a mastery of these elements of design becomes even more important. It’s more important for us to understand them, how to employ them, how to see them and their possibilities, how they help, and how they can completely destroy a composition. We have to become experts at seeing all of this real time, in the field, in the moment, often as everything is happening and changing rapidly.
Learning to recognize line in compositions and how that everything can be both distilled down to it and built around it, is how we begin to progress as visual artists and wildlife photographers. This is the art and the challenge of wildlife photography. Not only is what we do a measure of finding compositions and seeing the possibilities in the wild, but we must think on our feet while distilling everything before us down to a two-dimensional plane and decide, given the light and subject and backgrounds we have to work with, what it is we want to communicate, and how we wish to show these animals - often while everything is changing.
It’s anxiety inducing just to write it all out.
But that's the importance of considering such things when we are not behind our cameras. Articles like this one are designed to help you begin to think in terms of compositional strategies, to help you begin to see lines all around you, so that way when you are in the field and behind your camera, all of this is second nature.
To be continued. . .
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